Biopolitics & Biosecurity

In the last post I wrote were pointed out some ideas questioning if ebolavirus could be understood not merely as a virus, but a complex and heterogeneous entanglement constituted by artifacts, machines, technologies and other kind of materialities. Although I not mentioned it, there are other kind of elements like discourses, scientists, ideologies, enterprises, stakeholders and customers, for instance.

My dissertation is titled “Bioactants and biopolitics in the Preparedness and Surveillance Projects of the European Union” in line with one of the social interpretations of this topic. Biopolitics is a term within a large tradition in social sciences, whose most influent author was Michel Foucault although Rudolf Kjellén created the term.

Biopolitics as Foucault defined it: power over life has been exercised in the twin forms of the "anatomo-politics of the human body" and the "biopolitics of population." Both powers—that of bodily disciplines and that of the government of the population—are thus articulated around sexuality, and they support and reinforce each other.

Despite Foucault wrote  “The Birth of Biopolitics” or “Society must be Defended” talking about this management of life since the rise of Liberalism applied to sexuality, the jail or the asylum; it was not until Rabinow, Rose, Agamben, Negri or Espósito when biopolitics studies took off and were updated over the years because Foucault died in 1984. Thus, we can see Rabinow for instance:

We can use the term ‘biopolitics’ to embrace all the specific strategies and contestations over problematizations of collective human vitality, morbidity and mortality; over the forms of knowledge, regimes of authority and practices of intervention that are desirable, legitimate and efficacious.

Also Agamben when apply biopolitics to the bare life understood as the greek bíos reduced to zoé, a kind of life that emerges in an increasingly an even more naturalized state of exception.

Regarding biosecurity, I argue the turn into the logic of government from precaution to preparedness in the last decades also have biopolitical consequences:

•   New epidemics, outbreaks and diseases from this logic of preparedness look for an anticipatory knowledge of the emergence. This is achieved with new surveillance techniques based on computer and BigData technology where population are no longer conceived as a closed body, but an inter-connected body, intervened and embodied in dataflows and enacted in maps or diagrams.
• 
  
• Preparedness is bring to present a future possible threat through a new form of risk calculation: scenario planning. Thus, the management of life, bíos in the Agamben sense, become real in the present from a virtual future.
• 
  
• Life is redefined. From now, life can no longer be conceived aside from neither biotechnology nor bioscientific knowledge. What is life today, is defined by this kind of knowledge and no by right, law or royal power.

More info:

Rabinow's webpage 

References:

Agamben, G. (1995). Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life. California: Standfor University Press.

Foucault, M. (2003). Society must be Defended. New York: Picador.

Foucault, M. (2008). The Birth of Biopolitics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Rabinow, P. Nikolas, R. (2006). Biopower Today. Biosocieties, 1, 195-217.

Photo Credit: Flickr User Cesar Harada